Self-Sovereign Identity at IIW: We Have Liftoff

Last week was the 28th semi-annual Internet Identity Workshop (IIW). There were 129 session conducted by people from all over the world and about many different aspects of identity. There were technical discussions, standards works, policy debates, and lots of demonstrations. I'll post a link to the Book of Proceedings when it's available so you can read about them yourself.1

One thing that stood out to me is the impact self-sovereign identity is having. There were several dozen sessions on SSI. I was excited to see seven different implementations of Indy Agents that were working together and combined to create several demonstrations of credential exchange.

Evernym and Onfido did a demonstration of the Connect.me wallet and the Onfido identity verification service. You can do it too. Download the Connect.me app to you phone and then in the "Menu" select the Onfido item and start getting a real, live, production identity verification based on an existing identity credential such as a passport or drivers license. Once you do, you'll have a connection to and credential from Onfido.

You can also go to try.connect.me and walk through a demonstration of how credential exchange can work, using actual (though not real) credentials in your wallet

Vonx (BC Gov), StreetCred, and Spark NZ showed a demonstration using a StreetCred wallet to connect to and get credentials from two different services: a Vonx email verification service and an IIW attendee verification service. Once attendees had both of those credentials, they could use them to unlock a box that Spark had built and brought to the workshop.

IDRamp showed a demonstration of their product that can add credentials to any system that speaks SAML. They were demonstrating using a wallet to present a credential to log into Slack and Rocketchat. This is a production service that can credentialize any SAML service.

Pico Labs, my lab at BYU, demonstrated picos that acted as Hyperledger Indy agents and were able to connect to each other as well as other Indy agents like the AgentBook demo from Vonx. Picos are designed to act as digital twins or device shadows for the Internet of Things (IoT). Having agent-enabled secure messaging and credential exchange could be very useful for IoT products.

What got me excited about these demonstrations was that there were seven different organizations interoperably working in an ecosystem for credential exchange. While the rely on common libraries like Hyperledger Indy, they are separate code bases from different development teams that work together. This is a big development in the world of self-sovereign identity, demonstrating the reality of data exchange that is credential-based, secure, and private.